Have you ever seen a mobile ad and wondered if it might be a good fit for your business? Mobile advertising allows you find users at the right place at the right time. Looking for lunch options at noon? Have car problems and need to find a repair shop close by? Shopping for an outfit for a night on the town? Or, looking for a hotel to stay overnight? Most likely, you’re searching for these things on your phone, as are your customers.

According to a local search usage study by Localeze/15miles, 61% of smartphone users conduct local searches from their mobile devices. A mobile ad for your business can increase sales from these very people who are looking for your services/products in the moment.

While there are many different options to advertise online, Google Adwords is probably one of the most cost efficient advertising platforms. Here, we’ll provide some tips to help you effectively advertise to mobile users using Google Adwords:

Get Mobile-Friendly

First, you’ll need a mobile-friendly website. Mobile devices have a small screen, so users may have a hard time navigating through a regular website on their smartphones. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, DudaMobile can help you create a mobile version of your website in minutes.

Location Targeting

Google Adwords has great location options that will target people based on country, region, city, zip code, or radius around a business. In Adwords Location settings, a restaurant could target any mobile users in the immediate area of their location. You can set up your Google Adwords campaign to target users that are within a certain radius of your business. You can target 5 miles, so you capture customers in the general area. However, you may want to give a higher bid for users that are within 1 mile of your business or in the same zip code. Having this layered location targeting will help you reach all potential customers in your city, and help your ads show up for potential customers that can easily walk to your business.

In the screenshot below, you can see we set up the location targeting to target 5 miles around a zip code (94105). We set a secondary location targeting 1 mile around the same zip code. We increased the bid adjustment by 25% for users that are 1 mile around San Francisco, 94105, US. This bid adjustment means that if you’re bidding $1 on a keyword, then the bid will be $1.25 ($1 x 1.25%) for users that are within 1 miles of your set location. You could also set the location to your own business location and set a location radius (1mile, 5 miles, etc) around your business address.

Ad Scheduling

Ad scheduling allows you to show your ads at particular times and hours of the day. You can also make bid adjustments to increase or decrease bids during particular times of the day. Ad scheduling, when used correctly, can help you save advertising dollars, as well as increase sales and customers. Unless your business is open 24-hours, you should use ad scheduling to turn off your ads when your business is closed. For example, mobile users searching for “pizza” at night are probably looking for a pizza restaurant that’s open late or offers pizza delivery.

In addition, you can use ad scheduling to run promotions or specials during certain times/hours of the day. Increasing bids during prime business hours (i.e., Lunchtime for restaurants,morning commute time for coffee houses, happy hour for bars, etc…) will help you capture more business when demand is high.

Google Adwords Extensions

There are four ad extensions that all mobile advertisers should use. These ad extensions can make your mobile Adwords campaigns more effective.

• Google Adwords Hyperlocal Location Extension: This extension gives customers down-to-the-block level detail about your business and shows how far they are from your location. The ad displays your business address, phone number and location on Google Maps.
• Google Adwords Call Extension: This extension displays your business telephone to customers with the option for them to click-to-call directly from the mobile ad. Mobile click-to-call makes it really simple for potential customers to reach your business.
• Google Adwords Offer Extension: This extension allows you to offer customers discounts and special offers for visiting your business. You can set up ad scheduling in conjunction with Google Adwords Offer Extension to offer happy hour specials, cheaper hotel rates for unsold rooms after a certain hour, etc.
• Google Adwords Sitelinks Extension: This extension appears right under the advertisers ads and allows people to navigate to specific pages of your mobile site. Restaurants could have sitelinks to menu pages, business hours, reservation pages, etc. Up to four sitelinks can appear with your ads on smartphones.

There are a lot of similarities using Google Adwords for desktop/tablets versus mobile devices. A lot of desktop/tablet Adwords campaign best practices still apply to mobile-targeted campaigns. However, there are marked differences that you should be aware of. The real estate on mobile screens is tiny compared to desktop/tablets screens. Mobile ads should be more time and location aware because users are more likely looking for services/products at that very moment.

Utilizing the location targeting, ad scheduling and Google Adwords Extensions together, you can increase business during peak hours to capture demand, as well as drive additional sales during non-peak times. For more information on Google Adwords, check out our post “Don’t Waste Your Dough! 5 Secrets to Maximizing Google Adwords.”

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